Wondering what content your prospects find most relevant? Ask them.

by AccountingWeb on May 31 2011printer friendly

Today, everyone is all a-twitter about the importance of being relevant. As they should be.

According to Marketo's Andrew Spoeth, the average B2B buyer receives 20+ campaign touches per week. What this means is that prospects will only pay attention to that information they deem highly relevant to their situations.

Know prospects' priorities

If we want to capture prospects' attention, engage their interest, and ultimately win their business we need to speak directly to our prospects' highest priorities. What that means is that we need a way of determining what these highest priorities are.

There are many ways to find out. Examples include social listening, reading analyst reports, or querying our sales forces.

Go to the source

Nevertheless, I've found that the best way to find out what prospects will find most relevant is to ask recent prospects. After all, they've just gone through the entire buying process-and likely still remember what information they were seeking at each stage.

Best of all, each of these accounts was a highly qualified buyer for our products or services. Else, we wouldn't have spent valuable sales time with them.

Perform win loss post mortems

In a clever post[1] yesterday, Jeff Henning made a similar point. He observed that while losing a customer is painful, failing to learn anything from that loss is even worse.

Nevertheless, few capitalize on the opportunity to perform win loss post mortems. In fact, Pragmatic Marketing, a company that trains product managers and product marketing managers on best practices, found that less than 25% of the population[2] they surveyed engages in this process.